This Kind of Sex Needs to Stop in 2018

Hint: it has to do with porn.

Jovo Jovanovic/Stocksy

For the longest time, I’ve had no idea how to classify a genre of Truly Bad Sex I had in college and throughout my early 20s. I stand convinced that many sexually active young women have had it, or heard their friends reveal it as the reason there wouldn't be a second hookup with some guy. Recently, The New Yorker’s “Cat Person” described it aptly: “[He] moved her through a series of positions with brusque efficiency, flipping her over, pushing her around...a doll made of rubber, flexible and resilient, a prop for the movie that was playing in his head.”


This was the profoundly disappointing, simultaneously irritating AND boring intercourse I trudged through and even began to anticipate pre-first sexual encounters. My non-acrobatic legs sharply pulled over way-too-tall men’s shoulders. The lubeless, aimless pounding sans any semblance of foreplay. The sporadic vice grips on my boobs or butt, incidents as isolated as how I felt throughout the whole experience.


What made it more annoying was that my repeated exposure to it didn’t make me an expert in spotting exactly which potential partners would be prone to this. Mild-mannered men who planned genuinely romantic dates would later toss me around in 20 second intervals, like I was the world’s most undercooked pancake and not a person who opened up to them only hours before. It was always consensual in that I said yes to having sex. I just hadn’t consented to THAT sex. And in the rare times I did suggest staying in one position for at least half the duration of a Bon Iver song on their designated boning playlist, the guy would seem both taken aback and a little less turned on – as if not speeding through a rolodex of moves suddenly made sex a chore.

Obviously, men think this kind of sex is either A.) desirable for women or B.) they don’t care what women think, or maybe a mix of both; the idea of This Is The Sex That Makes You A Man is so pervasive that some men can’t even fathom that a woman wouldn’t be into it.


Throwing a woman around is a purely masturbatory performance for the guy, and it makes sense that the “movie playing in his head” is actually a movie he’s already seen, over and over again: porn. In a study of 400 popular porn videos on the most visited sites, it was found that “objectification was depicted more often for women through instrumentality [and] were more often shown as dominant and women as submissive during sexual activities.” And another study on the effects of pornography stated that “portrayals of women expressing pleasure while being aggressed against have significant implications in terms of the effects of pornography on consumers …viewers of pornography are learning that aggression during a sexual encounter is pleasure-enhancing for both men and women.” The myth that every woman deep down wants to be tossed around, a weightless vessel for a man to project his unfettered masculinity onto, is uh, pretty damn prevalent in porn.

Equally problematic for the guy frantically switching positions like a horny Energizer Bunny from hell: Porn is a movie. With scenes. Scenes that seamlessly cut from missionary to doggy style to an 8-person orgy, so the viewer stays engaged. The problem, as Pamela Paul in The Social Cost of Pornography states, is that young men (especially ones who started watching porn at a young age) are “generally not sophisticated enough to differentiate between fantasy and reality. They learn direct lessons from pornography, with no filter, and with no concept of exaggeration, irony, or affect. They learn what women supposedly look like, how they should act, and what they are supposed to do. They learn what women ‘want’ and how men can give it to them.”


Except no woman asked for this! No one actually wants this! Women orgasm differently from men and benefit from staying in one position for longer. Mental arousal via foreplay (which can take time) is also pretty crucial. And then the greatest irony is that plenty of women really do enjoy rough sex, or whatever the guy in question thought he was pulling off. But climax-inducing rough sex requires communication and trust, not some bozo dry-humping your inner thigh for 30 seconds because he was too rushed to actually find your vagina. Rough, quick-paced sex isn’t fun when you’re not comfortable, when you can’t pause to re-apply lube, or stay in the same position long enough to orgasm.

Because a new year signifies hope and change, I sincerely hope that a lot of men change this depressingly common sex habit. Not only does it immediately make a dude look stupid for not realizing that porn sex is a performance by paid actors – it can also make women feel uncomfortable speaking up. Think about it – you had a nice night, you go back to his place, and then the moment your clothes are off, so are all considerations for what actually turns YOU on. It's hard to feel safe in those scenarios. Not speaking up can be a combination of "do I dare ask him to go down on me, based on how tragically bad this already is?" and "how will he react if I say I don't like this?" And the pressure for women to endure shitty sex and then always be the ones to educate men on why it was shitty can be eliminated by one simple action: asking women. Because one thing is clear: no man would f*ck like this if he ever did.

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